I lost my sight when I was four years old by falling off a box car in a freight yard in Atlantic City and landing on my head. Now I am thirty two. I can slightly remember the brightness of sunshine and what color red is. It would be wonderful to see again, but a calamity(灾难) can do strange things to people. It occurred to me the other day that I might not have come to love life as I do if I hadn't been blind. I believe in life now. I am not so sure that I would have believed in it so deeply, otherwise. I don't mean that I would prefer to go without my eyes. I simply mean that the loss of them made me appreciate the more what I had left.
Life, I believe, asks a continuous series of adjustments to reality. The more readily a person is able to make these adjustments, the more meaningful his own private world becomes. The adjustment is never easy. I was totally confused and afraid. But I was lucky. My parents and my teachers saw something in me--a potential to live, you might call it--which I didn't see, and they made me want to fight it out with blindness.
The hardest lesson I had to learn was to believe in myself. That was basic. If I hadn't been able to do that, I would have collapsed (崩溃) and become a chair rocker on the front porch for the rest of my life. When I say belief in myself I am not talking about simply the kind of self confidence that helps me down an unfamiliar staircase alone. That is part of it. But I mean something bigger than that: an assurance（确信） that I am, despite imperfections, a real, positive person; that somewhere in the sweeping, intricate（错综复杂的） pattern of people there is a special place where I can make myself fit.
It took me years to discover and strengthen this assurance. It had to start with the simplest things. Once a man gave me an indoor baseball. I thought he was making fun of me and I was hurt. "I can't use this." I said. "Take it with you," he urged me, "and roll it around." The words stuck in my head. "Roll it around! "By rolling the ball I could hear where it went. This gave me an idea how to achieve a goal I had thought impossible: playing baseball. At Philadelphia's Overbrook School for the Blind I invented a successful variation of baseball. We called it ground ball.
All my life I have set ahead of me a series of goals and then tried to reach them, one at a time. I had to learn my limitations. It was no good to try for something I knew at the start was wildly out of reach because that only invited the bitterness of failure. I would fail sometimes anyway but on the average I made progress.
【小题1】We can learn from the beginning of the passage that _______

There have been many great inventions, which have changed the way we live. The first great invention was one that is still very important today---the wheel. This made it easier to carry heavy things to travel long distances. For hundreds of years after that there were few inventions that have made as much effect as the wheel. There was little unknown land left in the world. People didn't have to explore(开发) much any more. They began to work instead to make life better.
In the second half of the 19th century many great inventions were made. Among them were the camera, the electric light and the radio. These all became a big part of our life today. The first part of the 20th century saw more great inventions. The helicopter in 1909. Sound movies in 1926. The computer in 1928, and jet planes in 1930. This was also a time when a new material was made. Nylon came out in 1935. It changed the kind of clothes people wear. The middle part of the 20th brought new ways to help people get over diseases. They worked very well. They made people healthier and let them live long lives. By the 1960s most people could expect to live to be at least 60. By this time most people had a very good life. Of course new inventions continued to be made. But man now had a wish to explore again. The world is known to man but the stars are not yet. Man began looking for ways to go into space. Russia made the first step. Then the United States took a step. Since then other countries, including China and Japan, have made their steps into space.
68. The first great invention ever known was ______.
A. the camera               B. the wheel                 C. the electric light        D. the radio
69. Which of the following was turned out nearly at the same time with the jet plane?
A. The radio.                                                   B. The camera.             
C. Nylon.                                                               D. The helicopter.
70. This passage talks mainly about ______.
A. how inventions affect (影响) people's life      B. when electric light was invented
C. which country made the first step into space    D. why cars were very important
71. We can safely come to the conclusion that people's life will be made even better through ______.
A. new discoveries?                                         B. greater inventions
C. better ways to help people get over diseases?  D. all of above

A group of teenagers: they laugh and talk over each other, dance and make faces — you wouldn’t believe they had just played on the same stage as famous American singers Kid Cudi and Eminem.
These seven kids, all under the age of 20, are members of the band Kids These Days (KTD).
Fresh out of high school, the band already has done things that most teens couldn’t even imagine. They played at festivals including the recent SXSW in Austin and Lollapalooza in their hometown, Chicago, to crowds of loyal fans.
KTD uses a mix of hip-hop, jazz, blues and classic rock to make a sound of their own.
“KTD simply mixes most, if not all of my favourite music styles,” said Kamia Jones, as Chicago high school student.“I like that they aren’t afraid to be different and that their music is real and speaks to the soul.”
The band formed two years ago. Now, as well as local fans, they are becoming popular around the world. Their facebook page is filled with supportive posts from admirers from California to Tokyo.
“It’s really strange to me that people from London, Australia and Russia... They have heard
of us and they like our music because it’s really cool feeling,” says Marcie Stewart, who plays keyboard for the band.
Despite their recent fame, KTD is a group of normal teenagers and they remain very close to one another. While talking to the reporters, they dance and make fun of each other.
When asked what advice they would give to other teen musicians, Greg Landfair, KTD’s drummer, said, “Keep your heart in it. Never lose the music and what you are doing, because that’s what you’re here for. Let the music always be first.”
【小题1】KTD’s music is popular among teenagers mainly because ________.

I am a writer. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language — the way it can evoke(唤起) an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth. Language is the tool of my trade. And I use them all — all the Englishes I grew up with.
Born into a Chinese family that had recently arrived in California, I’ve been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks. Like others, I have described it to people as “broken” English. But I feel embarrassed to say that. It has always bothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than “broken”, as if it were damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness. I’ve heard other terms used, “limited English,” for example. But they seem just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people’s perceptions (认识) of the limited English speaker.
I know this for a fact, because when I was growing up, my mother’s “limited” English limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say. That is, because she expressed them imperfectly, her thoughts were imperfect. And I had plenty of evidence to support me: the fact that people in department stores, at banks, and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her.
I started writing fiction in 1985. And for reasons I won’t get into today, I began to write stories using all the Englishes I grew up with: the English she used with me, which for lack of a better term might be described as “broken”, and what I imagine to be her translation of her Chinese, her internal(内在的) language, and for that I sought to preserve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure: I wanted to catch what language ability tests can never show; her intention, her feelings, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.
【小题1】By saying “Language is the tool of my trade”, the author means that       .

About three hundred words in the English language come from the names of people. Many of these words are technical words. When there is a new invention of discovery, a new word may be coined(杜撰) after the inventor or scientist.
It is interesting to observe how many common words have found their way into the language from the names of people. Lord Sandwich, who lived from 1718-1792, used to sit at the gambling(赌博) table eating bread with meat in between. As the Lord was the only one among his friends who ate bread in that way, his friends began to call the bread “sandwich” for fun. Later on，the word became part of the English language.
The word “boycott” means to refuse to have anything to do with somebody or something. It comes from a man called Captain Boycott. He was a land agent in 1880 and he collected rents and taxes for an English landowner in Ireland. But the Captain was a very harsh(苛刻的) man. He treated his poor tenants (佃户) very badly. His tenants decided not to speak to him at all. Eventually word got back to the landowner and the Captain was removed（免除）. The word “boycott” became popular and was used by everyone to mean the kind of treatment that was received by Captain Boycott.
【小题1】A few hundred ___________ come from the names of people.